There is a plurality of systems and methods in the prior art oriented to cooperatively perform interactive operations.
Some conventional systems are oriented to collaborative environments. For example, the patent document EP0756237B1 (Canon Kabushiki Kaisha) describes ways to record environment configuration information to configure an application environment for cooperative operation for a group of workers. Patent document US20050278642A1 (Hewlett-Packard Company) describes a system for controlling a collaborative computing environment comprising: one or more servers, one or more client devices, a network that connects the server(s) with client device(s), a collaborative environment with a data structure that maintains the global state status of one or more environment elements of the collaborative environment, a module for collecting operating characteristics which describe at least one client device, a module for changing the way of rendering the environment elements for one or more client devices based on their operating characteristics, and a module to enable interactions between client devices and environment elements according to the current state of the environment elements in the global state data structure.
Other systems are oriented to communities of practice, for example, patent document U.S. Pat. No. 7,127,440 (Caterpillar Inc.) describes a method of implementing a community of practice to develop, for example, a program among employees, which involves identifying roles and responsibilities of participants and their goals, based on the need for the community of practice. The patent document US20060112052 (Caterpillar Inc.) describes a knowledge document management system for an organization, providing a knowledge document from a community of practice, to another practice in response to the request of respective member from other practice.
The definition of communities of practice is cited by patent document US20030216942 (Comsortlnc) that describes a system for influence network marketing. This document describes that businesses, especially those in knowledge industries, have developed a big interest in promoting and forming communities of practice among organizations as a mean of providing a high quality mode of work for the company, in which communities of practice provide an effective way of managing organizational knowledge. The document US20030216942 cites this phenomenon as described by Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder in their book ‘Cultivating Communities of Practice, chapter 1, pgs. 1-21’. As used in the document US20030216942, the term ‘community of practice’ can be taken to mean, as in the article by Lesser and Prusak, a group of individuals linked by informal relations that share similar work rules and a common context. The document US20030216942 also describes that Gongla and Rizzuto show their experiences with such communities of practice in a large organization, in their article titled ‘Evolving Communities of Practice: IBM Global Services Experience.’
Still, regarding communities of practice, and their involvement with technology, the book ‘Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities’ of Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith defines that the three traditional elements of a Community of Practice establish demands regarding technology, as described below.
First, for the element ‘domain’, technology enables the communities and their members to explore, define and express a common identity; enables them to see which are the open issues and negotiate a learning agenda that is worth pursuing; establishes who are the members and their purposes, and can help communities discover where it stands. and reveal it to others.
For the element ‘practice’, technology allows for continuous mutual engagement around the practice; it provides access to each other's practices; it defines which learning activities are possible; it can accelerate the cycle in which members explore, test and refine good practices; it can help a community create a shared context over time for people to realize continuous exchanges, articulated perspectives, accumulated knowledge and provide access to histories, tools, solutions and concepts.
Finally, for the element ‘community’, technology can support the bonding experience that makes the community the social environment for group learning, it can help people meet and decrease isolation; reveals interesting connections and enables members to meet in relevant ways; it can increase the interaction between diversity and shared knowledge; and it enables various groups and individuals to have initiative, assume leadership roles develop new roles, and create subgroups, projects and conversations.
A technical problem in particular in view of the documents cited in the prior art is that they do not provide adequate control of the operations of cooperative interaction between different strategic levels of an organization, redefining (unfolding) the practice in cycles of planning and execution, while at the same time enabling the authorship by its users by using devices that comprise a highly cognitive compatible user interface.